I bought a cute narrow rectangle pin loom and made a few bookmarks with it. I made one for my dad who is still using the bookmark I made him in about 1991.
Then I made a couple more with thrifted yarn. I love how the ones with pompoms turned out! It’s easy to see where you are in the book but the body of the bookmark is flat enough that the book is flopping open.
I’ve been half thinking that I might do a pop up market one day and these would be fun to make and sell as a smaller, more affordable item.
I ordered some square and hexagon pin looms from a Etsy store based in Russia. They took a long time to arrive but so far they are great!
I am loving the 2×2 inch square one. It has the same peg set up as my Zoom Loom so no learning curve.
I can make a square out of very little yarn in just a few minutes. I’ve been making them out of scraps from the temperature blanket and other projects. They are so cute and satisfying to make. I wish I knew about pin looms when I was a kid. These tiny squares would make a great patchwork doll blanket.
Right now I’m just sticking them in jars but maybe I’ll turn them into a table runner or a scarf? They really satisfy my love of using up scraps and quick projects.
It was warm today so I took it out to make a little video of my progress through last week.
The weather has been very warm for December and November and lot of variation. It’s been 69° one day and 43° the next. I’m glad I picked colors that work well together overall.
I uploaded a video to Tiktok of it. I’m posting it below but I’m not sure how great it will embed.
You can see below that the back is kind of bumpy so I’m already thinking about how if I will weave a backing and how.
I think it looks great so far! A few loose yarns and I haven’t washed it, of course, but it’s coming together. I wove a design on a few of the squares but nothing fancy. I saw a pattern for a heart I’m tempted by but I’m normally sort of tired by the time I’m doing the squares and don’t want to concentrate that hard.
I have only had one day since the beginning that I skipped so I’ve been keeping up! 115 blocks done. One a day and attaching them to the day before. I do a row of 14 squares (days) then attach them to the rest of the blanket. It’s going to be hot to do that when I finish in August!
I made a little video to show my progress. It’s not washed or blocked so it’s a little bumpy but you can get an idea of the temperature fluctuations.
We were getting into the blues of the 70s but it’s been warm the last few days so the next strip will be back to some purples.
I’m sewing 14 days together and then adding the whole strip at once on top of the previous weeks. You can see the pink square on the bottom left with a safety pin in it—that’s day one. I’ve been sticking a piece of pink yarn through the first day of each new row to keep that straight too. I don’t want any mistakes!
I have a notebook too (of course!) where I track the temps and what block I am on and the over all square number.
So far it’s a manageable project! I’ve found I really prefer it when I can get it done during the day, our house is dark and the bright light makes it so much easier to see. Plus it frees up some time the evenings to do other weaving (I have two projects on the go on my Cricket and Kromski rigid heddles) or something else. When I’m tired I dawdle on the pin loom because it’s a little fiddly once you get towards the end.
My husband bought me a Zoom Loom (4×4 inch pin loom) for my birthday. I think I got the hang of it on the beach yesterday and of course, ended up at Michael’s on my way home to buy yarn to make a Temperature Blanket with it.
I had seen people crocheting or knitting these blankets—the idea is that you stitch one row every day reflecting the temperature—but not weaving. With good reason—I don’t have a frame loom big enough for 365 rows nor do I want to tie one up for that long. It would work on a rigid heddle but again, it would be tying up the loom for a whole year. But why not a pin loom? I’ve made quilts before so piecing together little 4×4 squares sounds reasonable.
I’m going to have the first block be my birthday (August 19th) because I don’t want to wait until January and it was less than two weeks ago so it will be easy to catch up.
I love color so I decided to have yarn for every five degrees which I think will be more my style than bigger groupings. I saw a woman on Tiktok that did like 30° ranges! Why? Half her blanket was the same. I think having shorter ranges will end up using about the same amount of yarn.
I used the slightly annoying and tedious Temperature Blanket tool (I suggest you add all the extra rows you need before inputting any data) to look up the highs and lows of each day from August 19, 2020 to August 19, 2021 to get an idea of what amount of yarn to get. A 4×4 pin loom uses a little under 8 yards but I rounded it up to 10 to account for mistakes and any variations.
I ended up with 3 skeins of yarn for the most popular temperature ranges, 2 for some ranges that were right on the edge (some ranges had about 25 days in them and that was the upper end of what I could get from one 280 yard skein) and just one for the very highest and some of the lowest temperatures. For some of the ranges I did get a coordinating variegated yarn just for fun. The yardage on those were only 183 so I had to get extra of one just to be safe.
I’m using Loop’s & Threads Impeccable acrylic yarn (I think it’s Michael’s brand) because I wanted something easily washed, easy to find and didn’t have the dye lot issues natural yarns would have. It is advertised as a blanket yarn so it should be fine. With a coupon it ended up being under $3/skein for most of the yarns. The variegated was the same price for about 3/4 as much. I saw some people who used it with pin looms to make baby blankets so hopefully it will be fine.
I don’t have a huge table inside that ready accessible so I took all the yarn outside and figured out the order.
Of course there will be some intermingling but I wanted to make sure the colors that would most likely be together looked okay together. I went with what color felt like the temperature to me without fixating on “blue for cold, red for warm”. I wish I had some green in there but I didn’t end up liking any of them when I was at the store. I wanted to stick to one brand for continuity.
I did get some orange, yellow and a bright variegated I didn’t end up loving with the the other colors so I’ll have to find another use for them.
I used post-it notes and pinned them to each color. I then wound the most commonly used colors for right now into cakes and refastened the post-its to the cakes.
I used the site Time and Date to see what the high (and low) was each day. I’m only using the high. I saw some people using the high and low twisted together or using the average but using the high felt right. That’s the temperature I notice most often since it happens during the day when I’m awake! I am tracking the lows just in case I needed it for some reason.
I have a note book set up to track the temperature and I created a little reference board of all the yarn for a quick reference.
I’m not sure how I am going to stitch them together yet so I’m leaving long tails.
Rya Knot 